Work Immersion Experiences: Basis for Improving NCII Training of Senior High School Students

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The action research is focused on work immersion experiences of students before, during, and after work immersion. Work Immersion is one of the training grounds for every student in Senior High School to get National Certificate (NC).To acquire NC, student needs to be trained with service provider in their chosen field of specialization. These specializations vary from Senior High School offering throughout the country. The NC's served as vehicle in getting jobs after graduation and aligned students' skills and knowledge to the chosen colleges and universities. We want to find out the experiences of Agriculture students during work immersion as a basis of developing and improving systems of sending students to training centers and partner institutions. We sought to find the answer of the action research questions: What are the experiences of Agriculture students on work immersion? How do these experiences affect the students?

METHODS

We used Qualitative Phenomenological study which how people find their experiences meaningful particularly thematic analysis. With 23 Agriculture students who took the training, a purposive sampling is used to determine the participants and five (5) students, taken from 23 students, were actually participants to an informal interview. We secured consent to both parents and students for voluntary participation of the study. Then, the informal interview guide questions were conducted to the identified participants. The audios are transcribed and coded. Table of summarized data are presented and described. A contextual explanation, which is taken from interview of participant, is extracted to support the data.

RESULTS

We found out that students' experiences are challenged with preparation, distance of work immersion, financial problems, farm tools, and number of participants. The experiences affect the learners on how they performed their task; how they finished the work immersion; and the experiences contributed to the set of students' values, behaviour and beliefs in the whole duration of the work immersion.

DISCUSSIONS

Before going to work immersion, a checklist of things to bring, things to do and things to buy, design information materials to guide students, teachers and institution partners to be utilized before, during and after work immersion. It is also important to determine the cost of training and incidental expenses, to avoid congestion of students, additional work immersion teacher will be assigned; and similar action research to be conducted on experiences of teachers.